- April 23, 2024
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Kim and Meg Maguire read over the rules of their board game, Bid, Bluff and Buy. The second edition will be released in 2017. Photo by Jacque Estes
Kim and Meg Maguire, the owners of E3 Publishing, live in Island Estates. Photo by Jacque Estes
There’s a toy story within the gates of Island Estates.
Kim and Meg Maguire moved into the Hammock neighborhood in 2006 with their first project in the making, a family board game. The idea to stretch their collective creativity was born in 1998 while Kim Maguire was a senior vice president for Target.
At Target, Kim Maguire met Richard Tait, who co-founded Cranium, a game initially sold at Starbucks.
That meeting inspired Maguire to follow his dream and he created "Bid, Bluff, and Buy,” which he describes as the ultimate auction game.
The board game features items that have actually sold in auctions.
“It increases the play value and is very realistic,” Maguire said. “These items have sold in Sotheby’s, Guernsey’s and other auction houses. We researched to find the items sold.”
Board games have been relegated to closet shelves in many homes, as online games captured gamers' attention, but Maguire said he has seen a shift, and the traditional games are gaining popularity.
“When he started this, the board games had tanked, and I asked him, ‘Do you really want to do this?’” Meg Maguire said. “But they are making a huge comeback.”
“Game cafes are opening up across the country,” Kim Maguire said. “People are a little bit tired of everything being digital, and they are trying to create more family time.”
Kim Maguire spent his life in different aspects of marketing, especially toys. He was a buyer and then vice president at Target, executive vice president at QVC and worked with Creatively Classic Activities and Books.
“He kept coming out of retirement for fun opportunities,” his wife said.
One of those opportunities presented itself when the couple returned to Atlanta to help Carol Aebersold and her daughters Chandra Bell and Christa Pitts with their project, Elf on the Shelf. Kim Maguire had worked with Pitts when she was a show host for QVC.
“Our ‘ah ha’ moment was after the Elf,” he said. “We decided that if they did this, a mother and two sisters, starting this from the ground up, we could too.”
The Maguires named their company E3 Publishing, with the mission of “entertaining, engaging and enriching.”
“We came up with that because we’re looking to make memorable moments for families and friends,” Kim Maguire said.
The second edition of Bid, Bluff and Buy is planned for 2017, and is available through Target.com and Amazon.
Wanting to add to their inventory, Meg Maguire has her own project in the works, a children’s book with a plush dog designed to help children with their self-esteem.
“I am tweaking it and working on marketing,” she said. “We expect it to be out this spring.”
